Chapter 5 Satan
SATAN
We stood in silence and stared at each other.
It felt surreal. The lack of control over my own fucking life and body pissed me off.
I had no clue what was going on in Astrid’s brain, but mine was a jumble of incoherent gibberish punctuated by a litany swear words.
Our sour expressions demonstrated our horror at the situation.
I’d experienced many shitshows during the billions of years I’d been alive, but this…
this was seriously bad with the potential to get even worse.
The thought that my batshit insane mother could make it permanent was unacceptable.
Having breasts and being technically dead wasn’t working for me.
At all. For one thing, I liked having a dick.
Another, my better half like me having a dick.
Fuck. Elle was going to be pissed if I didn’t get my junk back.
Speaking with Sogdroth seemed wise. However, I wasn’t exactly me, and I couldn’t tell my therapist what was up, or my niece and I would be stuck in each other’s bodies forever. In the Immortal world, forever was a very long time.
Who had I fucked over that this was my reality? Well, that was a rather redundant inquiry. I’d made a living fucking people over. Shit.
“Well, slap my ass and call me Renee,” Martha said with wide eyes and a stupefied grin. “Ain’t this just the shit?”
“Understatement,” I muttered, realizing my center of gravity was vastly different in a female body.
The only thing I was grateful for at the moment was that Astrid hadn’t been wearing heels.
It was bad enough to be wearing melted tennis shoes, sweatpants and a t-shirt.
Falling on my face while navigating stilettos would send me over the edge. And I was very, very close to the edge.
Astrid closed her eyes—well, my eyes, technically—and inhaled deeply. I wasn’t afforded that luxury since I no longer breathed. Being undead sucked.
“Ground rules,” Astrid announced. She paced the foyer of the Vampyre compound like a wild animal trapped in a cage. “We need ground rules.”
Coming here today had been a grave mistake. I would pay my mother back for this appalling nonsense. I watched myself, who wasn’t me, freaking out. I had to admit I was a gorgeous specimen. Very suave and debonair. It was strange to me that Astrid wasn’t thrilled to be me. Everyone wanted to be me.
“State them,” I said flatly. Having my niece’s body and voice was alarming. I didn’t like it one bit.
“Do not touch my boobs,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. “I have no desire to touch your bosom. That’s disgusting,” I hissed. “Of course, I could throw that back to you and forbid you from touching my outstandingly enormous cock, but you’re going to have to touch it when you pee… unless you enjoy spraying urine all over the place.”
Astrid paled considerably. She looked as if she was about to puke. I found that insulting. Anyone should be honored to touch my junk.
“No,” she whispered brokenly. “I didn’t even think about that. I can’t do this.”
“You think?” I shouted. “This is your fault for saying I had an undersized cock.”
“OH. MY. GOD,” she snarled. “As previously noted, I didn’t say it. I repeated it. There’s a difference. You’re the one who said Vamps are pussies. It’s YOUR FAULT.”
In a fit of fury, she ripped off the sopping wet Armani jacket and pants.
With a snap of her fingers, she dressed herself, aka me, in flipflops, shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.
I screamed. Two could play that game. With a wave of my hand, I removed the sweats and melted tennis shoes she’d been wearing and replaced them a hideous lime-green floral housedress and Crocs.
It was Astrid’s turn to scream.
“I look awful,” she shouted at me.
“Pot. Kettle. Black. I don’t wear shorts,” I snapped back, glaring at her.
Strangely, it was easy to recognize her even though she looked like me. It didn’t feel at all like I was talking to myself. Her mannerisms, like the tension in her lips, the way she stood, shifted her weight, and moved her hands about were all wrong. She was certainly no Satan.
I wondered if she felt the same about how I was handling wearing an Astrid suit. I’d ask her at another time. We weren’t on the best of terms at the moment.
Astrid gave me the stink eye then gasped aloud. She smacked herself in the head. Hard.
“Avoid marring my face,” I ordered.
“Cakehole,” she shot back. “Shut it.”
“Fine.” I shrugged and conjured up a tube of red lipstick. I proceeded to smear it all over my face. “You were saying?”
She stared at me slack jawed.
I was winning… until I wasn’t.
The horrid woman conjured up a pair of scissors and hacked off a huge chunk of my hair right in the front. My gorgeous visage now sported a large bald spot roughly the size of a cantaloupe.
“NO,” I shouted, launching myself across the room and swiping the scissors from her hand. As I sprinted away, she was on my heels. “Stop,” I ground out with a wad of her hair in my hand and the scissors poised to destroy her look.
“You wouldn’t dare,” she hissed.
I was not one to pass up a dare and hacked the entire right side of her long curly locks off of my head.
It was her turn to scream. Again. We both looked like Hell warmed over.
She held her hands up in surrender. “Truce.”
I dropped the scissors and nodded curtly.
“Okay,” she said, looking hopeful. “We still have our magic.”
I raised a brow and waited.
“We can fix this,” she insisted.
“You mean we can go back into our own bodies?” I demanded.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. But… we could try.”
Subverting one of my mother’s spells was tricky business. The chance of it backfiring was astronomical. I walked to the staircase and sat on the bottom step.
“Close your legs,” Astrid said. “I don’t sit spread eagle.”
I did as she requested, but kept a running favor-log in my head. No favor would go without a return deed. “As much as I’d LOVE to be back in my own body, I’d say going against Mother Nature could be more catastrophic than the situation we’re in.”
She sat down next to me. It was comforting sitting beside myself—even in those hideous shorts.
“You make a good point. Let me at least fix your hair,” she said, waving her hand in a circular motion over her head.
It didn’t work.
“Wait,” she said, touching the bald spot. “What the heck?” she tried again.
It failed.
My ass puckered. However, I was more powerful than her.
I would fix it. With a snap of my fingers, I focused on both of our heads.
The result was the same as hers. It was looking like we were going to be stuck with whatever we did to each other during this unfortunate trial.
I silently cursed myself for the red lipstick move.
I might not be me, but I despised looking bad.
“Fuck,” I growled. “It’s clearly part of the spell.”
“Double fuck,” she agreed, pressing the bridge of her nose. “Okay. Fine. Ground rule. No disfigurement. Neither one of us want to be armless, legless or bald for however long this takes for us to sort out. Cool?”
I nodded. Keeping myself in check wasn’t one of my stronger points. Sogdroth had pointed that out. I’d threatened to kill him, but the Demon had just laughed. “Yes,” I conceded. “Cool.”
She turned to me and smiled. It was difficult not to focus on my fucking bald spot, but if she could overlook that she only had half a head of hair and a face covered in lipstick, I could reciprocate. Or, I could try.
“I don’t think I can touch your ween, Uncle Fucker,” she admitted with a wince of distaste. “No matter how bad I might have to pee.”
“Cock or dick,” I corrected her. “Not ween. Never ween.”
“Whatever,” she said. “I can’t do it.”
“May I speak?” Lizard requested.
“Be my guest,” I said with a shrug. With Lizard, speaking was a risk. The man had no filter. However, Astrid looked like she was going to lose her cookies. As much as I enjoyed admiring myself, I wasn’t too keen on observing myself throw up.
“While there ain’t no specific term for sitting when you pee, I might be able to solve the problem of you having to touch your uncle’s wank,” Lizard began.
Astrid perked up at the potential good news. While thinking about her technically touching my member was repulsive since she was my fucking niece, the fact that she appeared repulsed by the thought was beyond disrespectful.
Lizard continued. “The most common terms for urination are pee, tinkle, whizz, take a leak and go number one. None of those terms specify sitting or standing.” He smiled at her with sympathy.
“For simplicity’s sake, we can call it the sit down wee-wee.
In German, the word used for this action is sitzpinkler—meaning sit peeer.
In Japanese, they say suwari-shon. Does sitzpinkler or suwari-shon work for you? ”
“Maybe,” Astrid said. “Does it mean I don’t have to touch the wank or look at the wank?”
I rolled my eyes.
Lizard mulled the question. “You could either wad up a bunch of toilet paper and shove the wank between your legs, or you can choose someone to shove the wank for you.”
“Won’t the wank just drop between the legs when I sit?” she questioned.
“Normally, yes,” Lizard assured her. “But the wank during the morning whizz can be less predictable. If you don’t manhandle the wank correctly, there’s a chance you could wee-wee on your face.”
“I HATE MY LIFE,” Astrid shouted.
“JOIN THE CLUB,” I bellowed back, still wildly put out that she thought my manhood was gross. “And while we’re chatting, if anyone refers to my enormous cock as a wank again, I will set them on fire.”
“Roger that,” Martha said. “Is pork sword okay?”
“NO,” Astrid and I yelled in unison.
Astrid groaned. It took her a good two minutes to get the next sentence out. She opened and closed her mouth so many times I wondered if she was about to morph into a fish.
“How often do you have to go number two?” she whispered, horrified.